The World-Wide-Web ("Web") has become immensely popular largely because of the ease of finding information and the user-friendliness of today's browsers. A feature known as hypertext allows a user to access information from one Web page to another by simply pointing (using a pointing device such as a mouse) at the hypertext and clicking. Another feature that makes the Web attractive is having the ability to process the information (or content) in remote Web pages without the requirement of having a specialized application program for each kind of content accessed. Thus, the same content is viewed across different platforms. Browser technology has evolved to enable running of applications that manipulate this content across platforms.
The Web relies on an application protocol called HTML (Hyper Text Mark Up Language) which is an interpretative scripting language for rendering text, graphics, images, audio, real-time video, etc. on a Web compliant browser. HTML is independent of client operating systems. So HTML renders the same content across a wide variety of software and hardware operating platforms. Software platforms include Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Apple's Copeland and Macintosh, and IBM's AIX and OS/2, HP Unix, etc. Popular compliant WebBrowser includes Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Lynx and Mosaic.
HTML interprets links to files, images, sound clips, etc. through the use of hypertext links. Upon user invocation of a hypertext link to a Web page, the browser initiates a network request to receive the desired Web page. The selected Web page is loaded according to its HTML script formatting. HTML loads the whole Web page at once. Most client Web browsers provide some type of user feedback on the status of the loading completion. The feedback can be accomplished through status bars and other animated graphics. There is a finite amount of loading time dependent on factors such as the network bandwidth, network congestion and the amount of Web page graphics to be loaded. It is common for Web pages containing several images to take 30 to 60 seconds to load. The user must wait until the image is completely loaded if they want to view the entire Web page.
During the loading interval, the browser usually places text information up first and provides a generic default icon or grey box on the areas for images to be loaded. Web page providers typically design their respective Web pages to load attribution data such as trademarks first, followed by advertisement, text and finally images and related graphics. This load time is even more observable on newer Web pages and client browsers that support multiple frames or windows on a Web page. The reality in the transmission of HTML is that text and related graphics are competing for the same network bandwidth and their is a need to provide Web pages to display graphics information and text quickly.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,572,643 issued Nov. 5, 1996 to Judson for "Web Browser with Dynamic Display of Information Object During Linking" discloses a browser that displays an informational message stored on the client's system while downloading a hypertext document.
Thus, a need exists for a method to load multiple animated images on a Web page during browsing over a network with a limited throughput.